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Amazon halts pre-orders for Warner Bros. flicks including ‘The Lego Movie’ in the US

If you live in the US and point your browser to Amazon’s online marketplace, you’ll notice that it’s now impossible to pre-order many high-profile Warner Bros. movies including The Lego Movie, 300: Rise of an Empire and Transcendence.

The films are listed, but only as digital releases for its Amazon Instant Video streaming service. The disc-based versions are carried underneath, but there’s no indication of when it will be available – and more importantly, there’s no option to pre-order the film before its regular release.

Living in the UK, I also checked Amazon.co.uk and noticed that these tiles are available to pre-order over here. It’s unclear why the option has been pulled from the US store, but The New York Times is speculating that it’s an effort to gain better prices from Warner Bros.

It would be a similar move to the one Amazon pulled on book publisher Hachette – Jeff Bezos’ company is playing hardball at the moment by severely limiting the amount of stock it buys from them.

Nick Summers is a technology journalist for The Next Web. He writes on all sorts of topics, although he has a passion for gadgets, apps and video games in particular. You can reach him on Twitter, circle him on Google+ and connect with him on LinkedIn.